Unrelenting Media Negativity Corrected

I was going to post on this a couple of days ago but events overtook me on it. I'd like to revisit it.

In the middle of this past week as I was driving to work, the pre-election violence in Iraq was being covered on the radio station I listen to, WTOP in DC. The story referred to a convoy hit by a roadside bomb, another bombing attack (they didn't say what kind of bomb) and a firefight all of which resulted in the death of American soldiers. Listening to that, I thought to myself that they make it sound like our forces are simply waddling around in circles getting picked off like little duck cutouts at a carnival booth. You know, the kind where you throw 5 baseballs and if you knock down 5 of the duck targets, you win the prize? That's the image I was getting; that our guys are just walking around oblivious waiting for some terrorist to take them out.

I contrast that to the stories I read on the milbloggers' sites and with the e-mails I get from people I know who are over there right now. Those people are telling stories that for every American being killed** in a firefight, there's 20-30 so-called "insurgents" being taken out. The effect of leaving that out of the report is to really give the sense that there's absolutely no hope at all for a positive outcome, a picture that was demonstratedly false given today's participation in the elections there.

Reading over at Blackfive, however, I see that I wasn't alone in that thought. A post there quotes Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, writing in the Baltimore Sun. (Registration required at the Sun.) Check out Blackfive for the whole story frm Mr. Sowell, but this part here was the kicker for me:

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THERE ARE still people in the mainstream media who profess bewilderment that they are accused of being biased. But you need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of The New York Times and in much of the rest of the media. If a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and terrorists, while sustaining 10 fatalities, that is an American victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more likely to read: "Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq." This kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat. Kept up long enough, it can even end up with real defeat, when support for the war collapses at home and abroad. One of the biggest American victories during World War II was called "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" because American fighter pilots shot down more than 340 Japanese planes over the Mariana Islands while losing just 30 American planes. But what if our current reporting practices had been used back then? The story, as printed and broadcast, could have been: "Today, 18 American pilots were killed and five more severely wounded as the Japanese blasted more than two dozen American planes out of the sky." A steady diet of that kind of one-sided reporting and our whole war effort against Japan might have collapsed.

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(Emphasis mine) Dead - on - the - money. This is exactly the kind of behavior the media has been engaged in for most of the last 3 years. Had they been as diligent in reporting the successes as the failures, the victorious actions of our forces as well as the fumbles, they would have been serving the function they've claimed to be handling. But they're not. As a group, they have bent more toward trying to exert their influence than in informing the public and so long as that's the case, they cannot be trusted, by and large. I would hope they would change their focus now.

** Note: the original post used the term 'shot' here, but it was apparently confusing and led to the assumption that I was saying every time an American solider was wounded there were 20-30 terrorists being killed. An immediate tangent followed that calculated over 100,000 terrorists dead which led to the conclusion that people were being recruited into terror organizations at a hugely accelerated rate. I do not subscribe to that theory and the text here is corrected to avoid further confusion.